You can easily find and contact advisory board members since they are quite well known in their fields (and ask them whether we are real ). Good point about the links, though. Will add.
Only two of our team members have real life connection to Russia, so there's no reason for us to base there. Take me, for example (Alexey). I have a Russian name, live in Latvia, and (imagine we set up the facility in Russia) if I want to go to Moscow by car it will turn out to be farther than Warsaw because I have to waste few hours on the EU/Russia border.

I answered the question about escrow above in this thread: the escrow people are to be elected by Advisory Board voting once all of the members have signed up. And we're still expecting at least two important members. Should be done by the next week, though.